Anthropologies of the Future: Anticipating Energy Transition

The article considers how the categories of time and, especially, the future can be employed in anthropological reflection; both as study object and direction and as a horizon for current affects, emotions, experiences, and social moods, which are happening "here and now" and are associated with people's functioning in landscapes of energy resources extraction. The mining industry development transforms local countryside, changing the realities of living on coal reserves. To properly recognize such changes, we must activate spatial and temporal perspectives, while any explanation attempts encourage us to shift scales and values. Faced with an unknown future of transitions, local communities create narratives about the past and the maturing present by developing specific affective social poetics.Thus, energy transition studies provide an ethnographic contribution to the developing anthropology of the future, thus co-creating an imagination of the post-coal future.